Danielle Fishel recently slipped back into her 1999 prom dress to recreate a throwback photo with the boy who took her to the dance, Lance Bass. The pair dated when she was a high school senior and a Disney Channel star on Boy Meets World, while he was a teen idol as part of NSYNC.
Seven years after he took a besotted Fishel to prom, Bass came out as gay, and he has since tied the knot with actor and painter Michael Turchin. Now Bass, 46, and Fishel, 44, have charmingly reenacted their awkward prom picture, complete with her original off-white split gown.
Posting a video of the reunion to Instagram, Fishel joked in the caption that "the dress fit, but a few of my former curves clearly RSVP'd no." Fishel, who had two lumpectomies in 2024 to treat breast cancer, indicated in the video that the outfit was a bit looser in the front than it had been.
"Pulled out my actual prom dress from 1999 and somehow got back into it… after taking it in, a little altering, and a pep talk," she wrote. Fishel and Bass recreated the prom picture in order to promote his new appearance on the American Idol Podcast, which she hosts.
A few years ago, Fishel and Bass revealed that his reluctance to sleep with her on prom night was a precipitating event in his road to discovering his sexuality. The duo revealed in 2022 that they were developing a movie about their year-long romance, which captured the hearts of their fans in 1999 and 2000.
"Lance and I had a very wonderful, very warm, loving relationship but it was completely lacking of intimacy - intimacy in the romantic sense," Fishel told People. "I held on for hope for way too long that we were going to get back together and get married and have a family....It turns out I'm not Lance's type," she joked.
Bass explained that his inability to bring himself to sleep with Fishel on prom night "was the catalyst for me that made me start to accept myself, which took a long time after that, but that was definitely the first little straw that broke." Fishel recalled: "I had a vision for what that night was going to be, and Lance was very nervous about what my vision for that night was going to be."
She noted: "That is the night Lance talks about...where he felt like he was hurting me by not being honest with himself or anyone else about what was going on in his life." The discomfiting experience he suffered through that evening "was kind of the impetus for him to say: 'I'm going to end our relationship,'" she said.
Bass came out as gay on the cover of People magazine in July 2006 at the age of 27, while he was romantically involved with The Amazing Race winner Reichen Lehmkuhl, a former US Air Force captain. He struck up his romance with Michael Turchin in 2012 and they became engaged the following year before exchanging vows at what was then the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles five days before Christmas 2014.
Two months later, their taped wedding special aired on E!, making them the first gay couple to get married on cable television in the United States. Bass and Turchin remain married to this day and welcomed fraternal twins Violet Betty and Alexander James via surrogacy in October 2021.
After Bass, Fishel moved on with her college sweetheart Tim Belusko, whom she met after enrolling in California State University, Fullerton at the age of 27. They married in 2013 but split two years later, and she ultimately took up with rapper-turned-producer Jensen Karp, whom she has been married to since 2018 and with whom she now shares two sons, Adler, six, and Keaton, four.
